But change is scary!

Which is why we should all pay attention to Fear.less Magazine. It just launched with the first issue today. It’s free and it will serve you a healthy dose of courageous stories. Fear.less Magazine is a gift from Clay Hebert and Ishita Gupta, two of my fellows at Seth Godin’s Alternative-MBA program. I watched as they struggled with their own fear to put something out there into the world. Now we get to benefit from their early victory. The stories and interviews with remarkable people who danced with their own fear helped me figure out what to confront next in my endeavors.

Bravo to Ishita and Clay! This is such a brave thing to do!

Download —> Seth Godin’s Linchpin Live Session

You should go buy a copy of Linchpin, Seth Godin’s latest bestseller. It will change your life. It changed mine.

I remember my favorite class in college, Art History 101. Dr. Janet Black asked us to define Art. Very challenging. Looking back, I did a terrible job.

In the book, Seth does a remarkable job at defining Art. His definition is unlike anything you’ve heard before. I won’t spoil it so you should go and get a copy. But understanding that you can be an artist at what you enjoy doing is massively important. If you’re stuck, if you’re doing something you hate or even if it just doesn’t make your juices flow, find a way to read this book soon.

Borrow it from me if you need to. I’ll send you my copy with enough postage to return to me when you’re done with it or you can send it to someone else who you think could benefit from reading the book. Just email me at Allan (AT) allantyoung (DOT) com.

We are all early adopters now. Everyone is looking for the new new thing. When someone finds the latest new new thing, technology helps everyone else find out about it and we get to decide if we want to follow along. When done right this process moves lightning fast and blockbuster products surface almost instantaneously. New products cross the chasm faster than they’ve ever crossed before. For remarkable products, the chasm has shrunk.

Despite all this progress, there remains a lack of both art and science in the field of new product launches. We’re simply not moving fast enough or smart enough as we introduce new products because most entrepreneurs and brand managers don’t know how to launch. Billions of dollars go into research and development of new products every year. Billions more are wasted launching new products with misguided attempts to buy attention, interrupt audiences, and reach out to old, mainstream media. Thousands of products die early deaths because of bad launching.

There is a better way.

That’s why I’ve teamed up with Alex Krupp to change the world with LaunchHear. The idea for LaunchHear came out of an experiment called Swagapalooza Alex did during Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA program. We were both very lucky to have been given the opportunity to learn from Seth about bootstrapping, shipping, marketing, creating change, overcoming the lizard brain, becoming linchpins, making art, leading tribes, and being remarkable.

Equally exciting, we recently received seed funding from Y Combinator as part of the Winter 2010 batch. Wow! Y Combinator is without a doubt the best startup incubator in the world. No other incubator has been as consistent and prolific at picking great teams, seeding good ideas, and nurturing solid businesses. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston invented the modern incubator model. They layer on value by teaching kick-ass product development and exposing us to mentors like Joshua Schacter, Paul Buchheit, and other successful technology entrepreneurs. The seed funding from Y Combinator is insignificant. What matters most is that the YC team has great taste and an incredible network of people.

So we’ll bring to bear all the goodness we learned from Seth combined with the special Silicon Valley way of building scalable technology businesses we learned at Y Combinator. And we’ll be looking to change the worlds of PR and advertising as applied to new product launches.

To bring about that change, we’ll focus on a few things:

• answer the burning question – what’s new?
• answer the passionate question – what’s interesting?
• make select bloggers, tweeters, and netizens happy by providing interesting things to point to
• help new and remarkable products cross the chasm faster
• level the playing field for companies regardless of launch budgets

There isn’t a lot here about tactics or the specific products or tools we’ll build. I want to focus on the big picture and the fundamental core values.

We’re barbarians at the gate, outsiders with strong opinions about what needs changing in public relations and advertising. We’re optimists. We believe that remarkable products can still make the world a better place. We’re passionate. We’re looking for great people who feel as strongly as we do.

Because of our posture and worldview, we’re going to make a lot of people in the PR and advertising worlds very nervous. That’ll signal we are on the right track. Fortunately, there are also a few linchpins, mavericks and brave souls within the castle walls who see the opportunity we see for drastic change and progress.

If you’re one of these brave souls, you can reach me by email at Allan[@]LaunchHear.com – we’ll have loads of fun!

Fat pitches don’t come often. Life is a cunning pitcher. So good hitters don’t swing at everything. They pass on dozens of balls, take walks, and just wait for that one perfect pitch.

The point is to be selective. Every pitch that comes your way looks tempting. But just as you swing at one, it curves and the best you can do is hit a lazy and easily caught fly ball. Wasted effort.

Entrepreneurs can be good hitters or bad hitters. The good ones pass on opportunities all the time. They only swing on HUGE opportunities.

The same can be said for investors. Warren Buffett is famous for his patience. He waits and waits until a great company gets really cheap. Everyone else has bailed on it because they’re focused on the short term results. Warren sees the fat pitch that is a great company on sale, and swings hard for a home run by investing large amounts of money. This approach means he doesn’t need to diversify. Diversification is like swinging at a bunch of pitches.

This baseball season, you’ll see my beloved Boston Red Sox play competitively and probably make the playoffs. Much of that will be because they have a lineup full of patient hitters that just wait and wait for the fat pitch.

Funny how selectivity applies to so much in life.

We’ve all seen the type. The kind that opens or approaches so hard that you can sense their nervous energy and desperation to make a sale. Usually, they get shot down. But when a prospect gives them the time of day, they get so excited about a potential deal that they make all sorts of concessions. Long term profitability suffers as a result.

Aggressive Early, Passive Late – probably the wrong way to optimize sales.

Someone with value to give to a potential customer opens straightforwardly but gently. Qualifying the prospect correctly is more important at this stage than making a sale, any sale. If the product or service isn’t right for the prospect, then no big deal – walk away. When and if a fit becomes apparent, the superstar salesperson turns up the pressure and pushes for a sale that will make the customer’s life better.

Passive Early, Aggressive Late – usually the right sequence to optimize sales long term. So PEAL away.

Would you do it all again? I don’t mean doing everything the same way you did this time. You’ve learned some valuable lessons from your mistakes. I mean more deeply, does entrepreneurship still matter to you? When you have the next big idea, would you risk it all again?

If yes, you’ve given yourself permission to fail. There is great freedom in that. With whatever runway you have left or Plan B, you can behave with a touch of reckless abandon. You can go “balls to the wall.” You don’t need to be embarrassed by your crazy idea. Nothing can stop you now because, win or lose, you’d do this all over again. Funny thing, this posture increases your likelihood of winning.

The problem with being able to sell only what you like or “believe in” is that you never have to improve your sales skills. You get to brush aside every failure to sell something simply by saying, “I didn’t really believe in that.” Or you get to take a pass on a great sales opportunity that requires you to learn a new industry, sell to higher level executives, manage longer sales cycles, and close bigger deals. Simply by saying, “I don’t believe in that product or service,” you get to avoid all that intimidating professional and financial growth.

The real problem with this way of thinking is that it is solely focused on you. We know that the most successful companies and sales superstars have a customer-focused way of looking at the world. When deciding what to sell, wouldn’t you rather figure out what others like and believe in?

Here are 3 factors to look for when choosing sales opportunities to help you avoid the easy out of not believing in something.

1. Is the product or service ethical? I’ll leave you to decide what is ethical but if it doesn’t conflict with your deepest held values, you can’t write it off.

2. Will customers want the product or service? Will they find value in it? If yes, you can’t write it off.

3. Is the market for this product or service growing? If yes, you can’t write it off. This last point is all about finding the right platform for your sales career. Think of your sales career as a boat. You want to sail in a rising tide that lifts all boats. You wouldn’t want to be sailing the newspaper print advertising waters right now.

Two out of these three factors have nothing to do with you. The best and most successful sales professionals are extremely good at optimizing points 2 and 3. That’s because they’re focused on others and not themselves.

Of course we do better when we do something we believe in. Just be sure you have faith in your ability to grow.

Check out this video of my friend Ginger Costa Jackson singing in Verbier, Switzerland with Rufus Wainwright! I was so delighted by this I just had to share it. Ginger is one of the most talented and beautiful young opera singers.

I met her in Utah and she once gave us a little performance at our house. Set on the side of a huge mountain, this is a rather large house with a cavernous living room. She shook the rafters. The sound of her powerful voice traveled through my open windows, down the mountain and caused all the neighborhood dogs to howl. Astounding.

Ginger now performs all over the world and in New York City at The Metropolitan Opera.

This also happens to be my favorite song from Rufus. Little Sister is a sad song set in paradoxically cheerful music. The lyrics are bizarre but profound if you dig deep.

Are you judging your personal, professional, and organizational results on a superficial basis? Do you just ask, “Did it work?” When the results are great, people celebrate. When the results don’t meet expectations, people panic or start pointing fingers. I think that’s the typical response. Very much like the New York Yankees under the reign of King George Steinbrenner. It’s the reason why turnover was so horribly high, Brian Cashman and Joe Torre being the exceptions.

Process over results. You should be asking, “Regardless of the results, did we go through the right process?” Design the right process and you can confidently stick to it. The results will still be highly uncertain but you won’t blame yourself for random effects outside your control. You’ll also be able to stay faithful to a good process despite less than stellar results.

Everybody seems to be a “social media guru” these days. Like a real world sausage-fest, the “guru-fest” on Twitter and Facebook where four out of every five members claim to be some sort of ninja, jedi, maven, strategist or expert cannot possibly be a good thing. I exaggerate but echo chambers are not productive. What’s an earnest social media consultant to do?

Before you read on, you should know that I wrote this post only for those folks who are totally committed to the social media “industry” and intend to make a difference and long term careers out of this.

The Service Industry Cycle

Great, you’re in a service industry. This happens to every service opportunity. Something new and exciting happens and a few people move quickly to capture the opportunity. Others see money being made, mistakenly think it’s easy money, and then flood the scene.

We’ve reached that tipping point. We now have too many social media gurus.

How did we get here? The lowest barriers of entry ever before seen in history – except maybe for the world’s oldest profession. Anyone can build a website for little money and tell the world he is now a “social media guru” who will show clients how to navigate social networks. Even more absurd, he can go on a social network like Twitter, set up for free, and tell other members of the social network of his expertise. That’s like going to a hospital and having a fellow patient tell you he can cure your ills.

Plus there isn’t some lazy way to verify the quality of a guru like we have for accountants with CPAs, financial analysts with CFAs, or even clever business people with MBAs.

The Sameness of Promises Problem

If you want to be a successful social media consultant, you need to understand the Sameness of Promises problem. Every social media consultant promises the same thing - increased traffic and eyeballs, more buzz (whatever that means), higher search engine rankings, more followers, etc. By merely promising great results, there is no way to differentiate yourself and stand out from the guru crowd.

Now is the time to grow. To do this, you need to do something drastic, something different.

The Consultant as Curator

Fire your clients. Not all your clients, just your bottom 20% clients. Yes you do need to prioritize your client list. You need to be prepared to do this once a year. Your client list probably conforms to the 80-20 Rule: the top 20% of your clients is responsible for 80% of your revenue or profits. Your bottom 20% clients probably account for less than 5% of your revenue or profits.  You might actually be losing money servicing them.

Why fire your clients? When the promises you make are the same promises every other social media consultant makes, prospective clients have little to judge you on. Your client list is one of the few things competing consultants cannot copy. The quality of your client roster will signal to prospective clients if you’re truly a guru. Think of yourself as a curator of a gallery or museum. You’ve got to constantly clear space for bigger and better projects.

Bottom Line

None of this matters if you cannot execute and deliver on those cookie-cutter promises. But I’m assuming you’ve got the chops. I’m also assuming you want to grow and succeed in this business. You have a finite amount of time in a day. In order to get better clients, you have to free up time by firing low priority clients. I’ll leave you to define low priority. Maybe the readers of this blog can help. What are some ways you define low priority? What would make a client less important going forward?

Image Credit: Eric Weaver at Brand Dialogue